Emma Amos (b.1937, Atlanta, Georgia; d.2020, Bedford, New Hampshire) was an American artist, educator and activist whose paintings and prints interrogated gender and racial inequity in the art world and in the United States more broadly. Amos’s works often included Black bodies—men’s, women’s, her own—to make a statement about the way people of colour are considered and consumed in American society. Amos was deeply concerned with memory; she used her own likeness to communicate an anxiety about the erasure of Black female artists in the art historical canon, while taking a defiant stance against this structure. ‘It’s always been my contention,’ Amos once said, ‘that for me, a Black woman artist, to walk into the studio is a political act.’
The artist's inaugural exhibition at Alison Jacques will open on 11 July, and continue until 13 September 2025.
photo: Emma Amos, London Bridge is Falling Down, 1991 © Emma Amos
